Sound design in Film

The more and more I hear about sound, the more I start to be aware of its composants, issues and significations in, for example, movies and tv shows I watch, even though I already learned a lot about it in my cinema classes before. - I will not tell more than I did until then about my understandings in sound recording and digital transformation into a recorded data, because I did not concentrate my readings on that subject these last days, and the classes have not talked about it since my last posted message. - Of course, I cannot NOT mention the way I now see the sound because I read so a lot about it lately. First of all, I think that I have never realized until today how sound is complicated. Now that I know that its amplitude, frequency, timbre, wavelength, pitch, and so on are all related as well, I see why sound designers, directors or music/studio recorders spend soooo much time thinking about the room shapes, dimensions, materials, etc. : to be sure that everything is going well and in harmony with the rest. Also, I changed my way of thinking about sound when I started to work with ProTools for the last two assignments. Of course, you have to see the sound in its every detail, because if a sound is louder, different, has higher or lower frequencies, etc. than the other ones, you need to open a box, whatever it is, and modify the problematic segment. To do so, you absolutely need to know how tu use EQ, compressor, ProTools' tools, etc. and, alongside, to know what to change and which box to open to change what. Sorry if it's not clear, but it is my way of seeing it sometimes. - Now, the important part this week. The principal subject for the last 2 weeks was "sound design in film", so there is a lot to answer about that question. Last week, I talked about my readings from Alten and Chion in sound design, but right now I will focus on the notes taken in class. Starting from the beginning (which is kind of repetitive sometimes, considering I passed 2 years in a cinema program, but everyone thinks about sound differently, so it makes it interesting to see it from another point of view. Also, film is realllly a domain that passionates me, so I can hear from it all day long without being bored), we talked about the 3 basic types of sound in film ; narrative, abstract/exp., performance-oriented. Then, we saw a little timeline and continued with the Pre-Prod, Prod and Post-Prod considerations. These considerations are very important, because every dialogue or music track (to mention only these two) has to be DECIDED, THOUGHT, NOTED and so on. Movie directors (alongside with sound designers and all the staff) do not only decide to record sounds that are randomly played or produced while they are filming : everything is wanted in a movie. All that links immediatly to the types of microphones (boom, plant or wireless body types), with their descriptions, and the soundtrack relationship with picture. This relationship is, in my opinion, an important thing to think about. In fact, sound MEANS something from your movie, it SAYS something about it. You have to be sure of what you want to mean and say to the viewer when you take and record a sound. For voices it's the same thing, even if you are, if I can say that, a little more "restricted" ; dialogue or narration. The part I also like but that we less talk about is the sound editing and mixing (the part where you can rework and decide everything, which is the feeling I get when I do sound editing, for example for my 2 assignments), in other words the post-production. Thus, everything can be related to sound. What I mean by that is that it can give the viewer a loooot of different perspectives of our movie in playing with it (we saw examples in class). If you want the viewer to realize that, example, you are having subjective thoughts, you can play with the reverb or/and the delay to make it sound further, more abstract, etc. It has unlimited (or almost!?) possibilities !!!